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It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary - and not only necessary but urgent - to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.

Paul Valery

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Paul Valery
Age: 73 †
Born: 1871
Born: October 30
Died: 1945
Died: July 20
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Writer
Cette
Paul Ambroise Valéry
Paul Ambroise Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valéry
Paul Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valery
Interest
Times
Mind
Urgent
Good
Sign
Minds
Fate
Necessary
Days

More quotes by Paul Valery

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Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.
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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
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In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.
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There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
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Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
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Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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